


afterimage.

by strawberrie_jam



Series: difference. [1]
Category: Villains Series - V. E. Schwab
Genre: Late at Night, Mentions of alcoholism, Mentions of religion, Sunlight, because there is so much to study, dont squint, eli/serena if you squint, i come onto ao3 i post a short ass character study i leave, joys of online school, just an eli study, tHIS IS SO SHORT, this has no plot, this is probably slightly blasphemous but you didnt hear that from me, this is short and i wrote it in class, tw slight derealization, under 1k words i think
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-24
Updated: 2021-02-24
Packaged: 2021-03-15 07:27:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 851
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29680479
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strawberrie_jam/pseuds/strawberrie_jam
Summary: Merit, 1:48 a.m. Often, more often than he should, Eli ponders his ability.
Series: difference. [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2180997
Comments: 1
Kudos: 6





	afterimage.

**Author's Note:**

> tw for light mentions of alcoholism and derealization!! 
> 
> i know my best friend is gonna see this because he regularly checks the vicious tag. hey bestie i write fic now.

For a while, it was hard to spot it.

Eli researched, he blinked away the sleep from his eyes and scrolled through website after website, noted anomalies, scribbled them down. He pushed his glasses into his hair and got up and ate shit food in the kitchen of the apartment and watched the sun rise. 

When Serena came into his life, she lightly made fun of the glasses, hip perched against the side of the counter and gesturing with one long nailed hand. Eli didn’t expect her to understand. The glasses were part of the play he put on for himself. 

It’s one particular night in Merit that he recognizes it. The stars are in the sky, and Eli is leant against the window sill, one ankle crossed over the other. Serena is long asleep, already having kissed him goodnight, like they’re some perfectly suburban couple. Eli holds a stemless wine glass loosely in a hand with a slackened wrist, half full of whiskey. His father said that alcohol was immoral. It didn’t stop him from drinking himself into a haze on multiple occasions.

Eli gets some sort of cold shudder when he thinks of his father, the only thing that makes him feel temperature anymore. In turn, he thinks of the top step of the stairway, and all the steps after that, and then the scars on his back, and the snivelling, and the blood. 

Eli brings his free hand up to touch his face. At some point, he’s stopped being able to truly cry. He doesn’t know if it was because of his father’s reprimands, or if it was because of EO abilities, but he’s certain that God was responsible. 

Victor never understood that. He would stare at Eli, eyes flat and cold as a shark’s, when he talked about his faith. It never shut Eli up. On the contrary, he’d keep going, keep pushing, wanting to see what was behind the flatness. Whenever Eli wished for Victor to snap, he’d simultaneously wish for himself to get bitten. 

He thinks of what Victor would look like here, leaning on the sliding door to the balcony outside. His face pinched, his black turtleneck wrinkled, farther down in his glass than Eli. He’d probably be in the middle of saying something horrifically preposterous and interesting. 

_Dealing with that professor makes one’s mouth taste of the grave._

_Sure, Vic._

_Walking into that class is like dislocating each of my limbs._

Eli takes a sip to force Victor out of the forefront of his mind. Still, he lurks, and the old feelings that come with him stay there too. 

It’s not necessarily good, but rather, feelings in the same category as those Eli felt when he found his mother dead in the bathtub. A petrifying, morbid curiosity, and the certainty that the event would leave mental scarring. 

Being in their bathroom in that moment, a cold, adrenaline deathbed, had reached something deep inside Eli, and it had thrilled him. To say he had wanted his own death, staged out the scene with ice and EpiPens, to have control himself, to pass it off to Victor, and to come out anew. 

Often, more often than he should, Eli ponders his ability. It’s not a conscious choice, or a destructive one, and those two points put him on a different stand than so many EOs. It was not his deathbed of choice that changed it, he understood after a while. For a long time, he thought it had been something to do with him. His hardiness, his devotion, his pain. But through time and his own mission, Eli had come to understand that it was neither his making or his unmaking, but rather his maker. His God was responsible for the division of Eli’s abilities from the rest of EOs, he was sure, and God had done this for a reason. 

Beyond the windowsill he stands at, the night gets deeper. Eli feels lonely without the sunlight. It always enhanced him; turned him to gold. Nothing like it did to Victor—light washed him out and splayed his absence of corporeal presence. 

Eli takes another drink. The alcohol doesn’t do anything for him; his abilities keep him sober. But it feels right. To be drinking in homage of an age lost, and a mission still continuing. 

Eli looks back toward the dark doorframe. He feels like the hallway to the bedroom is too long.

Eli takes a long breath. He moves into the kitchen and puts the glass down on the counter, not bothering to empty what it contains. He doesn’t know if Serena is asleep. No doubt she’ll pretend to be regardless when he comes in. 

He doesn’t need to sleep, but Serena likes when he comes to bed. It’s a sense of continuity, of fortification. 

It’s hard to remember where his ability stops and he begins. For a man who eliminates those that have gone against God, Eli is very wrapped up in his own sin. He feels like he’s aiming a gun at what made him, and it’s aiming something worse back.


End file.
